Driverless 'horizontal elevator' shuttle debuts at CES

Updated 12:43 pm, Friday, January 10, 2014

Raphael Gindrat of Induct shows off the self-driving Navia, which resembles a souped-up golf cart, at CES in Las Vegas.

Raphael Gindrat of Induct shows off the self-driving Navia, which resembles a souped-up golf cart, at CES in Las Vegas.

Photo: Jack Dempsey, Associated Press

Driverless 'horizontal elevator' shuttle debuts at CES

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Las Vegas --

Former race car driver Max Lefèvre beat the competition by putting the world's first commercially available driverless vehicle on the road - but don't expect his invention to win any races.

With a top speed of 12.5 mph, the laser-guided, electric-powered, eight-passenger shuttle dubbed the Navia is too slow to share the road with real cars, even if it might be able to keep pace with a Muni bus on traffic-clogged Market Street.

Instead, this $250,000 vehicle - which looks more like an overgrown golf cart than a car or bus - is designed for places like university or corporate campuses, pedestrian walkways, convention centers, airports or amusement parks. In other words, places where it's a little too far to walk, yet too close to drive.

"It's mainly for areas where you would park your car and have to walk or use a shuttle to go around," said Lefèvre, who used to drive considerably faster when he was a championship-winning professional Formula driver.

During a test ride on a closed course at the International Consumer Electronics Show - where the Navia celebrated its market launch - Lefèvre tapped his thumb on an iPad-style control panel to set the vehicle in motion and pick its stops. The Navia can be programmed quickly to follow any route, without the need for tracks, roadway sensors or GPS navigation. Its own sensors detect when it needs to stop to avoid people or objects in its path.

The steering wheel and brake and accelerator pedals have been left out intentionally. Lefèvre said those omissions will speed up acceptance of the vehicle and should help calm nervous riders, because it won't look like a traditional vehicle that's steering itself with an empty driver's seat. After all, he said, automated elevators only have buttons.

"We call it a horizontal elevator," he said.

His father, Pierre Lefèvre, started the company behind the Navia, Induct Technology of France, in 2004. His original concept was to build a driverless car to allow commuters to be more productive while navigating the streets of Paris.

"We were both race car drivers," said Max Lefèvre, now Induct's marketing director. "But living in Paris is very difficult with traffic. You just spend hours in your car just to go to work and back."

Google's fleet of experimental driverless hybrids has captured more media attention, and car makers and after-market auto parts manufacturers were at CES demonstrating cars that park themselves or brake automatically to avoid collisions even if the driver is not paying attention.

But Lefèvre said his company decided a truly automatic, self-driving passenger car was still more than a decade away from becoming a reality.

So Induct pivoted to building public transportation vehicles because the Lefèvres believed that market was already ready for an environmentally friendly alternative. The company also claims the zero-emission vehicle can save 40 to 60 percent of the annual operating costs of a regular shuttle bus, including a driver's salary.

Beta versions of the Navia have been running at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, a technical college in Switzerland, at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, and at companies and business parks in the United Kingdom. Lefèvre said there are beta testers in the United States who are interested in leasing a Navia, but would not name them.

"We're not going to replace buses or tramways or anything, we're complementing them," he said. "It's a step between the driverless trains or the airplane, which mostly works autonomously right now, and the (self-driving) passenger vehicle."

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